The language of music or musical notation has existed for more than eight centuries, but until the advent of the printing press musicians and composers were required to perform the time consuming taks of manual notation in order to memorialize their compositions. Even with the printing press, music publishing has always been a post composition process usually performed by someone other than the composer or musician. With the introduction of computers, special programming languages were developed for large mainframe computers and later mini computers to handle the entry and printing of musical notation. These languages used a textually based user interface that required the user to manually enter lengthy sets of computer codes in order to generate a single page of musical notation. In recent years, programs have been developed for personal computers in an effort to aid the musician and composer in musical notation. However, most of these programs still require the user to enter the music to be transcribed in some form of textually based language.
In the last seven years, the evolution of synthesizers and other electronic musical instruments led to the adoption of an international standard for the electronic representation of musical information, the Musical Instrument Digital Interface or MIDI standard. The MIDI standard allows electronic instruments, synthesizers and computers from different manufactures to communicate with one another through a serial digital interface. A good background and overview of the MIDI standard is provided in Boom, Music Through MIDI, 1987 (Microsoft Press), which is incorporated herein by reference. A few software programs have attempted to take musical data recorded as MIDI messages and turn it into standard musical notation or sheet music. Most of these programs are designed for use by the hobbyist composer and cannot properly transcribe more complex musical notations. While some of these programs have the advantage of allowing the musician or composer to enter melodic information on an instrument (generally pitch or not values and real time not and rest duration values), they require the use of some type of an external metronome to enter rhythmic information associated with the musical information and relative note durations (e.g. whole note, half note) based on the preset metronome information. This requirement imposes an arbitrary limitation on the composer or musician's ability to play a composition and have it correctly transcribed because all of the melodic information must be properly entered at a single preset rate. In addition, while these programs can assign relative not duration values to the musical data by reference to the external metronome, there is no ability to enter any beat unit information for the muscial data. The lack of beat unit information prevents these programs from correctly transcribing the musical data entered. Consequently, additional editing and manipulation must be performed by the user after the musical data has been entered.
Although the various systems and programs currently available have enabled music publishers to produce higher quality printed music or enabled hobbyists to enter and print simplistic musical notation, none of these systems has enabled the musician and composer to easily and accurately transcribe musical notation from ideas to paper by directly entering all of the musical information into a computer through an instrument played by the musician. Accordingly, there is a continuing need for the development of new tools to assit the musician and composer in the transcription of musical information by providing a method and system that will allow for the entry of rhythmic information thereby enabling the musician and composer to more easily and accurately transcribe musical data as it is played.